Sunday 23 July was a big day for me because the third book in my DI Hamilton series, Deadly Friendship, was published. I thought my emotions would be far more contained than they were - not only was this my third book in the series, but, in total, it's the fifth I've published, so I should be used to publication day, right? Wrong! I've realised my nerves build the more I write ... and I'm sure many authors feel this. We're constantly in competition with the last book we've written - if readers loved it, can we match, and even exceed, their expectations? And if they hated it, can we better ourselves and our stories? We all know that we can't please all the people all the time, but gosh, we can continue to try ... and that in itself is nerve-racking.

Above: The fantastic authors, readers and bloggers whoshared a glass a fizz with me at midnight and right: author Lee Child even stopped to pose for a good luck photo with me on publication day

I'm sometimes asked by bloggers and readers if I have any special traditions for publication day, and the answer is always no. They've all been on a weekday, so I'm usually at home with my son, doing the nursery run, washing and cooking, and of course interacting with people on social media. So, maybe Harrogate did have something to do with the butterflies in my stomach, because as midnight hit, I was surrounded by amazingly supportive readers, bloggers and fellow authors who shared a drink with me and wished me luck. It certainly made for a memorable publication day.

To the other Authors Electric writers, do you have any fun traditions for publication day?

Thursday, 17 August 2017

The days of reliable editors in publishing houses and
magazines are long gone. Although many of them are still excellent, the changes
in English teaching here in Great Britain over the decades have taken their
toll. I notice far more mistakes in professionally-published books than I ever
did forty years ago. And if you’re considering the self-publishing route, you
need to be your own editor which is very hard work. Always remember that
writing is about communicating; if you cannot express yourself adequately,
without waffling, you won’t achieve the impact you want.

In the commercial world, word-count
is very important. Magazines have specific slots to fill, and children’s books
may be part of a series with a house style that doesn’t vary. Competitions will
have a maximum word-lengths for short stories, and if you run over you’ll be
disqualified.

It is always possible to cut,
even if it doesn’t feel like it. Honestly.

For the first pass, look at ways
of eliminating repetitions, condensing what you say, and cutting out
unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. It’s surprising how much you can get rid of
this way.

For the second pass, look at the
order in which you present information. Would it be more economical to do it
another way? Do you have any superfluous characters? If they’re necessary for
furthering the plot, can you combine two of them? Do you really need that scene
– what does it achieve? Try justifying each sentence to yourself out loud, and
asking yourself whether it furthers the plot, develops the characters, and
illustrates the theme. Not every scene can do all these things, but it’s
something to aim for.

The third pass is the most
difficult, and really applies to longer pieces such as books or plays. This is
when you still need to get rid of a lot of words, and you have to decide to get
rid of a plot thread. It’s a bit like unravelling knitting – when you knit it
back together, you must remember to pick up all the stitches. I know I’ve read
plenty of books when I suddenly think – whatever happened to X? It’s almost
certainly because the book has been edited, and a plot thread hadn’t been
extracted all the way back. Now that we have word processors, and search
facilities that can hunt out such things it’s much easier to do than
previously.

Sometimes it seems as though
you’ve edited out important moments to ensure the piece doesn’t over-run. This
kind of thing is an integral part of being a professional writer. I have often
been required to drastically cut a manuscript – usually because I’ve decided to
aim it at a different target. My book for reluctant readers, Fury,

was originally a full-length book
for adults and started life at 75,000 words. My agent suggested that, as the
main protagonist was a teenage girl, I should cut it to 40,000 and aim it at a
different market. When this didn’t sell we re-thought it once more, aimed it at
reluctant readers and cut it to 9,000, whereupon it was published by Barrington
Stoke. I realized that as the main protagonist was a teenager, it might work
better for a younger age-group, so it went from 70,000 words to 40,000. This
didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, and my agent suggested I cut it still further
for a different readership. So it went down to 9,000 words, and was published
by Barrington Stoke. Now that it’s out of print I’ve re-done it for the Kindle,
and this time I can illustrate it myself. It also means re-doing the cover, of
course, so that I don’t infringe the copyright of the original cover designer. So now there's the UK cover, the American one, and my Kindle version.The whole process of doing such a drastic edit was really interesting. You
start by getting rid of everything that isn’t vital, and you condense wherever
you can. But that’s not enough for a cut this drastic, so plotlines have to go
as well. It’s rather like trying to unpick a piece of knitting or embroidery.
If you don’t follow the thread all the way back to the beginning you’re left
with a question – what happened to the man in the top hat? Where did the horse
go? What was the result of the drought? I think we’ve all read books where
something has gone unanswered, and neither the writer nor the editor has
spotted the problem. It’s an easy error to commit, but it may stop the suspension
of disbelief because it’s reminding the reader that this story is a fabrication
– it only ever happened in the mind of the writer, not real life.

Tuesday, 15 August 2017

These days, I consider selecting a cover for my books to be as fraught with trauma as writing a blurb, or penning a synopsis, all of which are akin to tooth extractions.

Giving birth to the covers for my four-book series was comparatively easy. Half way through the respective manuscripts, ideas for the cover began percolating, sometimes only in snatches and occasionally arriving fully-formed. Because the series has an art and design thread, I conjured my ideas from a variety of historical and archaeological references, and ran a city skyscrape of Istanbul, London & Rome in the background of all four to denote the international thriller vibe. My graphic designer grasped the concept and used the photos I sent to create four luscious covers that definitely helped sell my books.

Then I decided to switch genres from a fun adventure thriller to psychological suspense--much more serious, much more penetrating, and definitely in need of a different approach. For the first time in my cover history, I hit a wall. It took me ages to come up with anything. Then, because there's a creepy dreamy quality to some sections of the book where my character is climbing the London rooftops, I imagined a cover capturing that one aspect. I sent my notions off to my graphic designer who, unfortunately, did exactly as I asked. I loved the result, by the way--the profile of a woman gazing down over the Victoria rooftops with St. Paul's cathedral in the background, all luminous blues and moonlight like an Arthur Rackham illustration.

However, I soon found out that such a cover said the opposite of psychological suspense. One of my Facebook writing colleagues suggested Peter Pan getting high, as usual, which would be perfect if Peter Pan was a serial killer.

Back to the proverbial drawing board went I. A cover designer reached out to be and floated another concept entirely: a woman crouching on a roof, obviously up to something nefarious in her black leather and spandex, with rain pummelling St.Paul's in the background. Now the mood said edgy, dangerous, utterly suspenseful ... and, as one author suggested, also communicated a vampire US political thriller. Regardless of what my opinions are regarding blood-suckering US politicians, that was not my book.

By now I was beginning to despair. I had alienated my graphic designer who didn't much like another designer's work encroaching on his territory, understandably. On the other hand, he wasn't a cover designer who understood the intricacies of targeting today's book market, and only took my directions, which I apparently wasn't qualified to give.

That's when I stepped back, way back. I turned the task over to the new cover designer along with my blurb and ended up with a striking cover I can live with. She switched Big Ben with St. Paul's to eliminate any US-centric notions that only one dome exists on the planet, and hardened up the scenery to denote the suspense aspect. All potential vampires and resemblences to comic book heros were quickly banished. Job done.

And the whole experience has left me sobered. I have learned that choosing the right cover requires more than a professional artist, it requires a knowledgable cover artist. I realize that I don't want a cover to echo the book's plot so much as to entice and intrigue within the reader's expectations of that genre. I also learned that group-think over covers can be a feeding frenzy. Among the helpful and supportive comments there will always be both haters and lovers, but that the most brutal opinions are often the most beneficial. The best advice I got was to just step away, Jane, step away ...

The general response among my individual writing friends is that they love the new cover. Those who are friends but not writers love it, too, but say it's "not me". Obviously designing one's own cover, even conceptually, puts so much of one one's own creative DNA into the mix that the story may be eclipsed. All my existing series covers definitely bear my brand and reflect the plots, but now I'm changing directions. Actually, I'm a cross-genre buffet writer, anyway, so switching gears suits me just fine.

Now let's see if the cover helps sell the book. That story's yet to come.

Monday, 14 August 2017

Late one evening, some time ago, after the millennials of
our group had taken themselves off to bed, an old friend and I decided upon one
for the road. The only option left at that hour was an underground nightclub.

A bouncer stood before the doorway, his bulky frame breaking
the sound of the drum and bass pounding up from below; a queue of young kids snaked
around the building. I looked down at my beige cardigan and at my friend’s
summer wedges, and suggested we might not fit in.

She looked at me aghast.

‘Nonsense,’ she snapped. ‘We’re
writers!’ and taking me by the elbow, she whisked me under the arm of the bemused
bouncer and away, down into the throbbing darkness.

What a great philosophy it is, that being a writer is an excuse
(no, an actual reason!) for living – for doing things and being in the world
and meeting people. As we all know, without it writing can too easily become a
regurgitation of other people’s written visions or worst yet, a vessel for Hollywood
to pour onto the page.

This last month I haven’t written a jot. My list of excuses
to my writing group grows long and ever more extravagant, despite their polite
reminders that the point of a writing group is that members should write occasionally.
But it has been busy, perhaps a bit too much living and not enough writing.

Fairlight Shorts opened in July

The Fairlight Short website (www.fairlightbooks.com) finally
launched two days after my last blog. We now have 14 short stories from 10
authors and more on the way. And we seem
to have gone global (in a locational sense) without necessarily meaning to. Our
latest contributor is from Oklahoma but lives in Paris and the website stats
show readers are visiting from all over the world. Goodness knows how they have
found us (which reminds me I need to have a chat with our Creative Web Design
Professional about SEO..) but it’s fantastic to see so many lovers of the short
story out there, enjoying this wonderful form of literary art.

﻿﻿
﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

Helen Stancey, author of The
Madonna of the Pool – Fairlight Books’ first publication of a short stories
anthology – certainly seems to have found the knack of living to write. Sarah
Morgan of On Magazine, said it better than I can. She said, ‘Stancey writes as
if she is one of us – an ordinary person, an observer of life who is well
briefed in the populace’s little foibles.’

Shall we Dance?

Each of the stories in The
Madonna of the Pool is told from the viewpoint of a different character,
and yet each rings true with enormous veracity. One of the stories, Shall We Dance, is available for
reading on the Fairlight Short website.

Helen first published a couple of novels in the ‘80s and
then took a long gap from writing. When I asked her why, she spoke of marriage,
of children, and a career. Finally she stopped talking, and shrugged. ‘I suppose
what got in the way..’ she said, ‘Was Life, dear boy. Life!’

Sunday, 13 August 2017

Over the last few
months, there's been something on my mind that's not totally
wholesome – crime! No, I'm not about to commit any dastardly deed,
I'm talking about crime writing.

I know we're
Author's Electric, but I hope you'll forgive me for talking about my
latest book, a crime thriller published by Bloodhound Books.

I wrote
Kill or Die (under a different title) some years ago. I sent
it off to a couple of publishers, who rejected it for very different
reasons. One said it was too graphic and gory, the other said it
wasn't graphic enough for a crime novel. So what did I do? Put it
away in a drawer and forgot all about it.

A couple of years
ago I came across it again, and noticed a handwritten comment on the
front page from a reader who had said they liked my style.
Encouraged, I read through it again myself, and decided it wasn't too
bad. So I re-worked and re-wrote and then eventually sent it out.

The first publisher I sent it to wanted to publish it, however they
turned out to be bogus – and the whole situation was really
traumatic. Once I'd extricated myself from their clutches, I tried
again. This time I struck gold, with an English publisher called
Bloodhound Books, who have been brilliant to work with.

Really getting into
the crime scene, I booked to attend the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime
Writing Festival at Harrogate in July. It was four days of author
talks, author panels, networking and socialising – oh yes, and
eating and drinking!

Meeting Lee Child

It was loads of fun,
and I came back buzzing with inspiration. Amongst the highlights for
me were meeting up with my publisher and some of the other Bloodhound
authors, and meeting Lee Child of Jack Reacher fame.

What a lovely
man!! He mingled with the visitors throughout the festival and was
happy to chat to one and all.

There was also a really
fun evening also when comic Sarah Millican hosted a 'chat show' panel
with Lee Child, Val McDermid and Mark Billingham. It was so funny as
she asked the sort of personal questions no other mortal would have
had the nerve to ask.

Ann and Francis Pryor

Another special event was the Author Dinner where every table had its own well known crime writer,
and we had Francis Pryor of Time Team fame. The evening
included a Murder Mystery where we had to figure out who the murderer was – and why.

While one of the
daytime events was a 'Could you be a Detective' session with 'Think
Forensic' who are real forensic detectives, who talked about the
things they search for when faced with a crime scene.

They also run
workshops throughout the year, so if you ever need some forensic
advice for a book you're working on, they are the people to call.
(www.thinkforensic.co.uk)

Since being with
Bloodhound, I've read lots of other author's crime novels, and I'm
really getting a taste for psychological thrillers and detective
books. So much so that I've joined the Crime Writers' Association, so
chances are, I'll be heading off to some other crime writing
workshops and festivals before too long.

What's your
favourite genre for writing and reading?

Kill
or Die (ISBN 978-1912175147)is available from all good book stores in
paperback and Kindle.

Saturday, 12 August 2017

Most of you are too young to remember, but you're about to learn some news--so astonishing and wonderful you can't help but cry

Well, that's enough foreplay. It's time for the news:

Once upon a time writers had actual lives. And their books were all the better for it...as were our poor addled brains. They did not spend all their time on Facebook or Twitter...doing interviews...writing blogs...traveling on extended tours. They had lives. And they had lives not only because they had enough money to have lives. No, the books they burned to write were born of a passion for life...and first-hand experience, not research snatched from Google.

Some great writers wrote quickly while others did not. Not all achieved fame in their lifetimes. But the books that do live on were grounded in experience. Rowdy and bloody or quietly blue, the one thing they all have in common is this:

They came from the hearts of real men and women who, by God, who had actual lives--and knew whereof they spoke: from the poems of Catullus to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...from Shakespeare to Flaubert...from Byron to Twain to Hemingway...

But that was then and this is now.

More like the worst world, for my dough. And the egomaninnies who thrive there do nothing times nothing but eat, breathe, sleep and shit self-promotion.

--G has written another of his 3000-word FB political rants, recreational breaks from the novels he turns out at Guinness speed

--E touts his wares on Twitter in an endless flood

--S works both FB and Twitter round the clock to hustle his 86 novels--F posts hourly reviews of his new book on FB for 33 straight days

And on and on and on.

My poor head spins, my stomach heaves. With increasing speed I block FB Notifications for posts written by egomaninnies. And I won't bother with their books. My book shelf, of course, will be smaller than most. But the shelves will hold real books written by real people.

*****

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Friday, 11 August 2017

Writing is a solitary
occupation. Even if you are one of those people who can happily work in a
coffee shop, or on the kitchen table with life going on around you, you are
still working on your own and in your own world.

When I am in the middle
of a novel or short story, I sometimes feel as if I’m moving around in a
bubble. There is the world out there that everyone else belongs to and the
world I am currently inhabiting with a cast of characters that I know well, or
am getting to know and in a place that may or may not exist, but is coming
clearer, like an old fashioned negative in developer liquid, minute by minute.
Sometimes this means I have to stop mid task, or even mid-sentence to rush back
to my computer.

This state of distraction
can be annoying to those around me and is also isolating as no one who hasn’t
experienced it can truly understand what it’s like. Non writers find it hard to
empathise with the ups and downs of a writing life, how some days the story
flows and you feel brilliant, while on others it is stuck in some primeval mud
and the whole process of getting a paragraph down is like wading through foul
smelling ooze.

The highs of acceptance,
and the lows of rejection too are treated with a dose of common sense by
friends and family. But however encouraging, or sympathetic, your nearest and
dearest, the person who is suffering or rejoicing suspects that they can’t
really know how it feels.

This however is not the
reason for needing a writing bestie.

My friend and writing bestie, Jan Edwards,
tells it how it is. If I give her something to read, she will send it back
covered in comments, which I have learned, over the years, are invariably
right. She is was, who made me re-structure “House of Shadows” which
consequently made it a much stronger book. She also has a brilliant way of
finding anomalies in the plot, or pointing out errors of fact. In my current
work in progress, one of my characters was listening to “Knights in White
Satin”. Jan took one look at the year in which “Shadows on the Grass” is set
and told me that the album hadn’t been released yet, so it was back to
researching.

She’s good on sentence
structure too and has often suggested a way around a clumsy piece of narrative,
or has put her finger on exactly that dialogue doesn’t convince.

She is in fact a great
editor, but there is more to the relationship than that. We meet most weeks for coffee and spend a
good couple of hours talking about where our writing is going and what we’d
like to achieve in the near future; whether we should be concentrating on a
particular genre, or submitting more short stories. We also support each other
in promoting our books, like dressing up as Bunch and Dodo for Jan’s launch of
“Winter Downs.”

We also run 6x6 a reading café where local writers can strut
their stuff and appear together on local radio.

We don’t always agree.
What we give each other is honest feedback and endless support. We don’t,
however, spend time commiserating, or moaning about the current state of
publishing, because that ultimately is self-defeating as it mires you in a
state of failure. Boosting confidence and finding new outlets for promoting
ourselves and our work is much more practical and has really shown results. As
has sharing our mistakes.

Over the years we’ve been
meeting in Trentham Gardens we have learned a lot. We’ve both changed
direction. I’ve moved from writing primarily for children, to focussing on
Contemporary Women’s Fiction, while Jan, whose primary interest used to be
Fantasy, is concentrating on her series of Crime novels set in the 1940s.

Having a writing bestie
that you trust is like having an editor and life coach on tap. For me it’s make
a huge difference to my writing and to my view of myself as a writer. I can
really recommend it, the only thing is Jan is already taken.

Thursday, 10 August 2017

I don’t mean that literally of course – I wasn’t that lucky,
and had to make do with the usual dysfunctional family. But I did spend a lot
of time escaping into books from everyday life, and wolves seem to have figured
quite largely in them, either as the main protagonist or as characters playing
important supporting roles.

It started early on with the usual fairy tales: Red Riding Hood of course (I always
considered the pro-bloodsports huntsman who hacks off the unfortunate wolf’s
head to be the real villain of the story) and The Three Little Pigs. Very early on in my school life we were
introduced to tales featuring Uncle Remus’ Brer Wolf, Aesop’s boy who cried
wolf and learned about Romulus and Remus. A bit later I read for myself
Kipling’s Jungle Book, Joan Aiken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and John
Masefield’s Box of Delights – the
phrase “The wolves are running” still sends a delicious thrill of excitement
down my spine.

Wolves didn’t vanish from my life as I got older: they still
kept on popping up everywhere, in Jack London’s Call
of the Wild and White Fang, our
own Susan Price’s Ghost World
sequence (plus others) and for the last twenty odd years in Robin Hobbs’ magnificent Seven
Duchies books featuring Fitz, the Fool and Nighteyes. And you must have been
taking an extended holiday on a distant planet in a galaxy far, far away if you
haven’t heard of the direwolves in GRR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) books …

These are just a few – there are so many more wolves I could
mention, such as Maugrim in The Lion, The
Witch and The Wardrobe, Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother, Emma Barnes’ Wolfie,
Jean George’s Julie of the Wolves, Rosemary
Sutcliff’s Warrior Scarlet, Tolkien’s
wargs in The Hobbit … well the list
goes on and on. I expect you have your own favourites.

So when I started making needlefelt brooches as a sideline
to writing and teaching, it was probably inevitable that as well as making
hounds and hares I also made wolves. Well, why not? As I said, they’ve been
around all my life in my reading matter, so something was eventually bound to
rub off …

Winter
is coming – have you got your wolf head brooch yet?

Available
in a range of colours with eyes made of semi-precious gemstones including onyx
(black), carnelian (red), mossy agate (green) and red/brown or yellow/brown
tiger eye.

Wednesday, 9 August 2017

In June and July this year I met Tracy and then Tracey. Both of them are former nurses, both are using
art to combat serious illness and both of them – even on the briefest
acquaintance -- are life enhancers. I feel better for knowing them.

I met Tracy Brown beside Brightlingsea Hard in Essex as we
waited in weak sunshine to witness the re-launch of an oyster smack. The
Countess of Wessex (patron of the Sail Training Associations) was expected so we’d all been moved around to
accommodate Media and Security, then were moved once again from behind the
receiving line of Dignitaries. Very dignified they are too, in Brightlingsea. They
haven’t had a royal visitor to the Hard since Queen Mary in 1932 but as Brightlingsea
is the only Cinque Port north of the Thames (to be precise it’s a Limb of
Sandwich) it appeared to have experienced no difficulty dusting off the cocked hats, swords and black silk stockings.

The Countess is the one
not in fancy dress

Tracy and I had become neighbours through these reshuffles.
We were both keen to retain a good view of the proceedings: Tracy because she’d recently passed her City
and Guilds photography and wanted to carry on building her portfolio, and I because I’d brought my
notebook and was hoping Yachting Monthly
might like a few words for its news pages. Those were surface reasons: essentially both of us were determined to respond to the event in the ways that made us happy. We were hungry though and the Countess was delayed. Other
people were heading for the fish and chip shop but neither of us wanted to lose
our good position, perched on the edge of the slipway, directly facing the receiving
line. It’s a measure of the friendliness
of the day that Tracy’s other neighbour, Michelle, who had been bolder in her
quest for chips, unhesitatingly shared her portion with us. If you ever read
this Michelle, thank you. Tracy and I didn’t talk much: she was snapping, I was
scribbling but we arranged to keep in touch afterwards via Facebook.

I’m so
glad that we have. Tracy’s photos of that day were outstanding (in
my eyes) and, by reading her posts from many other occasions since, I can sense some
of the energy and the joie de vivre with which she is battling breast cancer. And if you consider that the “battling” word has
become somewhat overused, I can only insist that’s the right one for Tracy. She’s a former hospice nurse, determinedly living the
message “I am not what happened to me: I am what I choose to become.” She also advises "Live for the moments you can't put into words" -- which her photographs achieve wonderfully.

I haven’t met Tracey Shorthouse in person – only
via twitter, email and her volume of poetry I Am Still Me. Tracey too is a former
nurse; her enemy is not cancer but dementia. "Life is being positive. I live with dementia and love my life. I write, walk, take photos, give talks." Two years ago, aged 45, she was
diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and a rarer form of dementia called
posterior cortical atrophy. This almost came as a relief: it had been so hard
knowing there was something wrong in her head but not knowing what it was and
sometimes finding it impossible to persuade people, even doctors, to take her
seriously. Now Tracey, like Tracy, is determined to make the most of every day.
“You have to grab opportunities with both hands as they might not come
again.” She wonders whether she feels like this because of her previous
experience. “During my nursing career, I used to see patients give up so easily
and it really stuck in my mind. When I was diagnosed I didn’t want to be like
that.” (The
Elder Interview)

Clearly both Trac(e)ys are realists and both are brave and
positive women but this blogsite is about words and writing which is why I’m
going to commend Tracy Brown’s photos to you, thank her for her
companionship on a particularly pleasant day then focus a little longer on
Tracey Shorthouse’s poetry.

In human terms I Am Still Meis an achievement. By the time Tracey was diagnosed she’d
forgotten how to use a computer but she’s re-learned that skill and convinced
herself that she can re-learn other skills “if I push myself”. Physiologically she may be right: the brain is a marvellous place and even when shrinking under
the stifling attack from the tangles of the tau and amyloid (which I imagine as similar to “devil’s snare” from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) I believe it may have the ability to forge new neural pathways where possible. Dementia activists – people
like Tracey who “push” themselves -- are often so articulate that cynics accuse
them of not having the illness "really".

Initially Tracey tried to write short stories to keep her brain stimulated but that didn’t work. On my tiny research sample of one (reading to Mum) I can see why – the writer (or
listener) of a story almost always needs to retain some factual information, which may be a difficulty.
In poetry or song, however, precise recall may be less essential and the patterns
of rhyme and rhythm provide a supportive structure. Tracey found that she could express her emotions through poetry.

Many of Tracey's poems in I Am Still Meaddress her dementia directly and, for me, these are her best. You could argue (okay I won’t, but one day
there’ll be a psycho-linguist who does) that dementia is an illness that very often attacks sequentially, decimating Proper Nouns, nouns (collective, abstract and concrete
nouns) until it reaches the pronouns that seem to be the very heart of our
identity. Tracey’s poem “Prison of
Thoughts”is not always rhythmically
secure, its rhyme choices are occasionally odd but it deserves to be remembered for
ever for a single, defiant half line “Her is me”. The speaker
is betrayed, angry, demanding to be released:

“You promised and made a vow

But all you have
done is imprison her.

Her is me, don’t
you hear?

It’s so
unfair, this prison of walls When you are there and I am here. You say it is to prevent my falls.

That’s why my mother hates me sometimes when I say goodnight
and leave her, though I undertake faithfully to return next day and I promise there will be someone there all night to look after her. It's not good enough. “Her is ME!” she wants to say. How can you
leave ME here? “It’s so unfair.” It is. As her dementia advances into its later stages that desperate
battle for ME may represent the self’s battle for survival. One her bad days Mum often loses "I" (the pronoun that is a subject so may have agency) and only the suffering object "me" remains: "me frikened, me no understand".

Do you remember those
heart-rending, hate-filled monologues in The
Hobbit when Smeagol / Gollum realises that the Thief, Bilbo Baggins has
stolen his ring, “my precioussssss”, the single thing he treasures, that makes
his life both possible and worthwhile, that constitutes his identity. When my
mother is at her worst, full of grief and loss and hatred, she is Smeagol, that
almost-lost soul in mental darkness, no longer able to conceive of the autonomy
of others, only their unfairness, cruelty and trickery. “Her is ME, don’t
you hear?” I sit out of sight, at this
point as she often becomes extraordinarily eloquent – all word-finding, pronoun-difficulties
gone – and acts out a completely fluent melodrama – which is a phenomenon I
confess I cannot understand at all. Perhaps drama, not poetry or even music is
her final frontier? I have no thesis to offer.

But Tracey Shorthouse is not like my mum. There’s a saying to
cling to in dementia studies “If you’ve met one person with dementia, you’ve
met one person with dementia.” It is surely the most various of all illnesses, enmeshed
as it is with the intricate patterns of synapses and neural pathways which
every individual, even if they are as comparatively youthful as Tracey, have
taken a lifetime to develop. Tracey is determined that her poems should not be all
about dementia. In the Elder interview she said “The poems aren’t just about
dementia though – dementia doesn’t define me, it’s just part of who I am.”
Tracey (like Tracy) seems to be constantly reaching out, she gives talks, even
when her speech is slurry, she supports the newly diagnosed, she attends meetings, she tweets, she advocates.

Yet there is a sense in which Tracey's dementia (the alien in her
brain) may affect the way she writes her poetry, whatever the subject matter. A friend who is a care-worker described people with dementia as "real" and when I asked her what she meant she explained "whether they tell you that you are the best or the worst person they are telling you the truth as they feel it in that moment". Explaining her writing via a tweet Tracey said: “At first my poems
were on dementia and then it changed to whatever was in my head. If words were
there then I used to write down. No control.”

I think I can see this sometimes in her rhymes – a word is seized
with real zest, rather as if it might otherwise vanish:

“Don’t say
sorry or look uncomfortable

I know that
I’m full of peace.

There is no
way that I am vulnerable

Cause one
day I might go to Greece.”

In this poem “Acceptance” the word "Greece" comes with a moment
of thrill: the word / the idea is there in Tracey's head, she grabs it and writes it down before can escape. How this would play in the intensely rational, analytical Leavisite
lit.crit. sessions of my university past I’d prefer not to think but, once recognised, I found that it gives the poems their true individuality and charm, their reality.

Nicci Gerrard wrote a lovely article recently about the medicinal
effects of art. Both Trac(e)ys are living witnesses to the truth of this -- and that's good for the rest of us as well.

Tuesday, 8 August 2017

Last month I
wrote about how I like to get the ‘facts’ right in my stories when it comes to
animal behaviour. This month I wanted to share how I also like to weave nuggets into my stories that were once considered fact but have now been disproved.

For example, I’m
working on another collection of stories featuring the animals of Moon
Meadow Farm. One of the stories concerns Hedgehog and a young swallow. Because
I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to hedgehogs I’m already aware of the many facts once believed by our ancestors. Perhaps my favourite was written
by Albertus Magnus (1200 – 1280):

"The hedgehog,
which lives in its lair in the ground, indicates when storms of wind are
coming. It makes three or four exits to its lair or dwelling and when it senses
that the wind is going to blow from a certain direction, it closes the
corresponding hole…………"

This is one of
the facts I’ve not included in the new short story collection I’m working on (which will be 10 short stories featuring Fox of Moon Meadow Farm). However,
two facts I recently discovered I will be including. The first concerns the swallow
and where our ancestors believed they disappeared to during the winter. Prior to the secret of migration being unraveled it was believed swallows spent the winter hibernating, buried in the mud of
ponds and lakes. Today we know they fly thousands of miles to spend those months
in the sun.

Another fact I came across whilst researching for a story that features Fox was how foxes deal with fleas. Many old texts and stories detail how Foxes
and other members of the dog family walk into a river backwards in a bid to dislodge
parasites. However, it would appear this fact may not be fiction because I
came across this gem:

By
an old hunter and naturalist of local repute a story has been told here
confirming as absolutely true and trustworthy the published account, which has
had few believers until now, of how foxes rid themselves of fleas. The fox, according
to the book narrative, backs slowly into a stream of water with a portion of
the pelt of a rabbit in his mouth, after the fox has made a meal of the rabbit.
The water drives the fleas first up the fox's legs and then towards his head
and finally out on the piece of rabbit fur, and then the fox drops the fur, and
his pests are done for. The local hunter and naturalist referred to, strange to
say, had never heard or read of this story when he told of the actions of the
fox which he observed in the waters of the Patapsco river. The little animal,
he stated, backed into the river slowly with so much deliberation that he
wondered what it meant. It carried something - he did not know what - in its
mouth, and dropped the something when out in deep water. Then the fox hurried
away. The object left floated near to the observer, and he hauled it ashore
with a stick. Fleas literally swarmed through the object, which was found to be
a bit of raw rabbit fur. The observer had a puzzling mystery explained to him. He
says his admiration for the shrewdness of the fox grows more and more as he
grows older and learns his ways.

So, to
close this post I wondered if you have any favourite wildlife based facts believed by our ancestors. If you have please feel free to share below. You never know I may just use it in one of my short
stories (I will credit you).

Monday, 7 August 2017

An approximation of more or less any leading UK politico and THE leading US one.
By Poliphilo (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

I was sorting through (and chucking out) old notes and files
this week and came across a cutting from way back when the appalling Michael
Gove was
Education Secretary. It concerned a 15-year-old schoolboy, Joe Cotton, who was
the first ‘child’ (as theGuardiancalled him) ever to address the annual
conference of the National Union of Teachers. He was speaking about some of Gove’s
cynical, sinister ideas, one of which was
to get rid of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) to help with his budget
cuts. This is what young Joe was quoted as saying: ‘Well, I don’t know how
nifty Michael Gove thinks he can be with a loaf and some fishes, or even a bus
pass and some textbooks, but he’d need nothing short of a miracle to replicate
the benefits of EMA with that budget’.

First, I admire enormously a 15-year-old with the confidence to stand up in
front of a hall full of teachers and articulate the feelings and ideas of his
generation, and I’ve no doubt his words – and that sentence – were well
received. But I saved the clipping to make a structural point about forming
effective sentences. So many of them tail off, finish on a down beat and are consequently less powerful.

I'm not suggesting that is necessarily the case here. The word ‘nifty’ is good. It implies sleight of hand,
ducking and diving, smoke and mirrors. Applying it to Gove as well as to one of Jesus’ miracles
puts both it and the ‘miracle’ in a different light. There’s no longer the
po-faced, respectful kow-towing to the specialness of divine intervention;
instead it conjures up (see how subtle I was there?) a seedy bloke on a music
hall stage with a wand, hat and rabbit – or, if you like, ‘a loaf and some
fishes’.

So it’s good, and it’s worth a laugh. BUT…

The laugh has to be delayed while he finishes the rest of the sentence, and
that ‘rest’ consists of a much weaker joke, then a serious political point and
finally an ‘explanation’ of the loaf and fishes reference (in the word
‘miracle’). So, if we get rid of the weaker – and rather confusing – joke about
bus passes, the sentence has 4 elements it needs to juggle:

1. the benefits of EMA,
2. the budget cuts,
3. the fact that 2 and 1 are mutually exclusive,
4. the gag about Gove being miraculously ‘nifty with a loaf and some fishes’.

It’s a good gag not only because it’s funny but also because it skewers Gove’s
self-importance and calls attention to the sleight of hand involved in his
economics. By rewriting the sentence and putting the elements in the above order,
the gag is made even better and more effective because it’s now the punchline
and also offers light relief after the seriousness of 1, 2 and 3. You can then,
of course, refine it even further by moving around the words inside each
element. It’s not rocket science but it does illustrate the important
difference between writing and editing.I wonder, for example, how much the wonderful Nora Ephron, who wrote When Harry Met Sally, juggled the 2 elements of Sally's line 'You’re gonna have to move back to New Jersey
because you’ve slept with everyone in New York'. Try it. If you swap them around or relate them to each other differently, you get different emphases and therefore different jokes.In schools, I get students to isolate the different elements in their own sentences, then move them around and see the changes that makes to their meaning, impact, power. It’s something I still do myself. And, of course, it’s not just for comic effects. Satire, irony, sarcasm, tension, misdirection - they all depend on the coexistence of distinct frames of reference operating simultaneously. In talks and workshops with readers and writers, I often digress into the tricks and effects we can get by establishing separate narrative layers. At one level the subject is 'normal'; but interpose another level and he/she is simultaneously assessed through different criteria. You probably do it
already but if you don’t, give it a try. Youcould be pleasantly or, better still, unpleasantly surprised.

Sunday, 6 August 2017

So I’m reading and ranting again. This
one shall remain nameless – and actually I finished it last night and already I
can’t remember the title or the author. That’s how memorable the story was. A trad-published
book, too, which surprised me.

So why am I ranting? Because it’s the
second book I’ve read in as many weeks with exactly the same two ‘faults’ – in my
opinion, of course. The lack of cause-and-effect and the inappropriate
dissolution of tension.

Let’s take the first one. Our unlikely
and unreliable narrator (this trend is so fashionable right now, it hurts – and
unless it’s done really well, it’s
largely ineffective …) heroine is caught doing things she shouldn’t. She’s
trapped, together with a couple of young girls and the bad guys are pissed-off
and about to do Unspeakable Things. But we never know or see these Unspeakable
Things, because – guess what? – the chapter ends and suddenly our heroine is
free and wakes up in hospital! What?

Cause and effect. Rule number whatever
in the writer’s handbook. Thy protagonist
shall escape thy antagonist by reasons of his own doings. Or more basically
– our heroine needs to escape the bad guys herself
and not because of something somebody else has or hasn’t done. No deus ex machina for me, thank you very
much, and I don’t much like the white knight in shining armour either. In this
case, apparently one of the teenage girls snuck out and called the police. It’s
not really cricket, is it?

It’s something I try very hard not to
do myself in my books. Sometimes it takes me ages to figure out how my
characters are going to get out of whatever predicament I’ve dumped them in
this time, but they always do it themselves by using their initiative or
because of something they’ve already done or not done – and not because of
something happening off-screen.

What about the inappropriate
dissolution of tension? I’m guilty as sin of that, as my editor will love to
point out. He always picks me up when I spend ages building tension in a
chapter and then let it go like a rubber band snapping. I can see it when he
points it out. So our next heroine (who again spends most of the novel
wandering around uncertainly and not knowing who to believe) is again trapped.
Stuck in her husband’s ex-wife’s house, pregnant, and locked in a small room,
she’s scared for her life and the life of her baby. Ex-wifey or even hubby may
or may not already be a murderer … So let’s build the tension as she searches
for a way out before she falls asleep until hubby arrives and in a few lines
she hits him on the head.

And then ... and then … we’re in a new chapter nine months later. Baby born,
everything now pink and fluffy and we get the what actually happened bit related to us retrospectively. Told not
shown. Elastic bands pinging all over the place as the tension has sprung
somewhere off-planet.

Maybe it’s me. I like a novel to be a
satisfying experience. I like something to happen to our hero or heroine and I
like them to deal with it themselves and come out the other end changed in some
way. Is that too much to ask? Am I reading the wrong novels? Maybe I need to
get back to writing them instead.

Saturday, 5 August 2017

I often say life's too short for de-cluttering, and I still firmly believe it is - until suddenly time is too short not to de-clutter. I ran up against this problem at my day job recently, when we had to clear everything out of our office and move to a different, and not entirely preferable, one in the basement. There are two windows in our new office, but they might as well not be there, because the only tantalising glimpse of the outside world is of a tall grassy bank topped by a 6 foot high hedge. But I mustn't go on and on about that now. One of the few benefits of the new office is that the people responsible for refurbishing it have at last agreed that we should have light switches, which you would imagine are more or less essential in any interior but which we didn't have in our office upstairs for reasons I had better not even start going into here. Another benefit is that the room is so dark and cosy that everyone has begun to refer to it as the Bat Cave. I hope to develop super-powers any day now.

Anyway, I found myself having to tidy the shelves above my desk as well as the desk itself, and actually to throw stuff out. As I had been working in the same office, with a short spell in a neighbouring one, for over 27 years, an amazing amount of stuff had accumulated, from a plastic bag that had disintegrated in the drawer, causing havoc, to a Myers-Briggs personality profile someone had done for me when we did management training, assorted birthday cards, a good deal of spare stationery and a folder called 'The Chicago File' which I had created ages ago when making arrangements for my first trip to America.

I am generally a great believer in keeping things just in case they come in useful one day, and this approach has served me well in the case of work emails which I like to keep as evidence of other people's unreasonableness, apart from anything else. However I've now discovered how to archive off older emails into a series of folders which apparently don't take up any room on the mail server but which are still accessible. I believe the same thing may be possible with Yahoo mail but I haven't dared to try it yet, despite having about 10,000 messages currently in my inbox.

At home the result of keeping things just in case I need them is that I am unable to find them if I do need them, which I suppose defeats the purpose of keeping them in the first place. I've tried to pre-empt this with my writing by making notes only in a notebook, which there is slightly less chance of losing than some random piece of paper, and by having a folder on my computer called 'all writing' where I put absolutely everything to do with writing. Every so often the main folder looks a bit cluttered and I set up another sub-folder and re-organise things a bit. That's quite simple compared with the physical effort involved when you suddenly need a cat basket to transport a cat to the vet and have to turn out the cupboard under the stairs to find one, only to see three cat baskets later in a pile in the corner of the front room. Now that we only have two cats I suppose one of the baskets is redundant. But with cats you never know when another one will come along.

But I digress. I think this happens more and more as you get older, and in fact I have been considering just lately whether I should try to cut down on the rambling in my novels. Maybe my mind needs to be de-cluttered too? Or maybe that would rob me of all creativity - I tend to think it would.